TapElectoral Roll

It is time to reapply for the church electoral roll again. This comes up about once every 5 years or so. Rather than just tick the boxes and sign it I had a close look at the form (PDF) this time. It is very strange.

First you need to get the name of the parish right. If you are lucky this has been filled in for you as many are no longer obvious.

Declaration one is straight forward; aged 16 + and baptised. I was interested to note that there were no qualifications to baptism in any particular denomination or creed.

The second requires careful reading as it relates to three issues simultaneously—membership, of which more later; residence in the parish, this is not obvious unless you know your parish boundaries well; and regular attendance, which only applies if you live outside the parish.

In the footnotes there is a statement which talks about churches in communion with the Church of England which are only other Anglican and certain foreign churches. This struck me as strange as I thought the Methodist, Baptist and most other “ordinary” protestant denominations were in this category. Which prompts the question, what does it mean? I thought it was a mutual agreement that people who were in the practice of taking communion in one church were permitted to do so in the other. From this document it is restricted only to the Anglican Communion, not that this is actually a hindrance to joining the roll.

Going back to declaration two, the common feature of all the options is “a member of the Church of England”—now what does that mean? It is not what I am applying for here, that is just entitlement to vote at a particular local church annual parish meeting, effectively membership of the local parish church. Nor is it having been confirmed, that rite of passage performed when one reaches an age of discernment and you consider yourself a committed member. Confirmation is certainly not a requirement to be on the roll, or any other office in the church short of ordination that I can discover. Membership of the Church of England seems to be something rather ephemeral, it comes down to just turning up regularly. So the whole complicated declaration could be reduced to one of regular attendance and leave out the rest of the stuff with complicated doctrinal issues of communion and Trinity and that of residence.

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